Something’s happened to Ulysses! His . . . His . . . It’s dropped off! Quick, Mummy! Quick!”
There was the noise of a chair being knocked over in the kitchen and Irene came rushing into the room, followed by Stuart. She pushed Bertie aside and looked at Ulysses, who was lying contentedly on the changing mat.
“Oh! Oh!”
It was all she could say. Ulysses was not Ulysses at all. This was a girl.
“The wrong baby!” Stuart stuttered. “They’ve given us the wrong baby!”
Bertie stared intently at the baby, who smiled back at him.
“Do you think we can keep this one, Mummy?” he asked.
66. Speculation on What Might Have Been While the unsettling discovery was being made in the Pollock household that the wrong baby had been handed over at the council holding nursery, Matthew was hanging his back in twenty minutes sign in the doorway of his gallery. This sign, as had been pointed out by numerous people, including Pat, was ambiguous and mendacious. In the first place, it did not reveal when the twenty minutes began, so that the person reading it would not know whether it had been placed there nineteen minutes earlier, or just one minute before. Then, anybody who knew Matthew’s habits would be aware of the fact that he rarely spent less than forty minutes over coffee in Big Lou’s coffee bar, and that anybody choosing to wait on the doorstep of the gallery until his return could face a much longer wait than they anticipated.
It was Angus Lordie who had suggested a different sign, one that said, quite simply: out. That would have the merit of clarity 222 Speculation on What Might Have Been and would raise no false hopes. “There are occasions,” he said,
“when the simple word is best. And that reminds me of the story told by George Mackay Brown, I think it was, about the Orcadian who completely disappeared for eight years. When he returned, simply walking into his house, he was asked by his astonished family where he had been. He gave a one-word answer: ‘Oot.’”
Matthew had found this very amusing. “Funny,” he said.
“That’s really funny.”
“Yes,” mused Angus. “It’s funny to us. But, you know, I’m not sure if that would be all that funny outside Scotland. There are some things which are made funny because of a very specific cultural context.”
“Oh, I think that would be funny anywhere,” said Matthew.
Angus smiled. “Maybe. But here’s something which is only funny in Scotland. It was told to me by a teacher. Do you want to hear it?”
“Only if it’s funny,” said Matthew.
“It is,” said Angus. “It’s funny here, as I said. A teacher noticed that a boy called Jimmy wasn’t eating fish when it was served in the school lunch. After a while, she decided to take up the matter with the boy’s mother and wrote a note to her to this effect. Back came a letter from the mother which said: See me? See my husband? See Jimmy? See fish? We dinnae eat it.”
There was only a moment’s silence before Matthew burst out laughing. “That’s very funny indeed,” he said.
Angus nodded. “Of course it is. But you could tell that story down in London and they’d look very puzzled. So why do we find it so amusing?”
Matthew pondered this. There was the habit of saying
“see” before any observation; that was a common way of raising a subject, but in itself was not all that amusing. Was it the way in which the mother developed her response, step by step, in the manner of a syllogism? That was it! It was a peculiar variant of syllogistic reasoning, perhaps, and its Speculation on What Might Have Been 223
expression in the demotic seemed surprising and out of place.
But there was something more. It was the conflict between two worlds: the world of the teacher and the world of the mother. When two very different worlds come into contact, we are amused.
Angus might have read Matthew’s mind. “It’s the desire to deflate officialdom,” he said. “There’s a strong streak of that in Scottish humour, and that’s what’s going on here, don’t you think?”
Matthew nodded, and thought: and there’s something funny about Angus.
That day, which was Saturday, was usually a busy day for Matthew, and he might have felt reluctant to leave the gallery unattended, but by the time that ten o’clock came round he was feeling distinctly edgy, and thought that one of Big Lou’s double espressos might help.
When he entered the café, Big Lou was by herself, standing at the bar, reading a book. She looked up at Matthew when he came in, slipped a bookmark between the pages of the book, and closed the cover.
“Don’t let me disturb you, Lou,” said Matthew, glancing at the title of the book. “Eric Linklater. The . . .”
“The Prince in the Heather,” Big Lou said. “Robbie gave it to me. It’s quite a book. All about Bonnie Prince Charlie being chased through the Highlands.”
Matthew reached over and took the book from Lou. He opened it at random; a picture of a wild coast, a map, the prince himself draped in tartan. “Quite a story, isn’t it?” he mused. “It seems like a game from this distance.”
“It was no game at the time,” said Big Lou.
Matthew sensed that he was being judged for levity. “No,”
he said. “Of course not. But there’s something that interests me, Lou. What would have happened if Charlie had pushed on just a bit more? Weren’t things rather disorganised in London? What if he had huffed and puffed a bit more and blown their house right down?”
224 We All Need to Believe in Something Big Lou’s answer came quickly. One did not engage in such idle speculation in Arbroath. “No point thinking about that,”
she said. “It didn’t happen.”
“But it could have,” said Matthew. “It could easily have happened. Look at how far he actually got. And anyway, there’s nothing wrong in asking these ‘what if’ questions. I saw a whole book on them the other day. What would have happened if the American planes had been on a different deck at the critical moment in the Battle of Midway? What would have happened if the wind had been coming from the other direction when the Spanish fleet took on the English? We’d be speaking Spanish now, Lou, as would the Americans if the wind had shifted just a few degrees. You know that, Lou?”
Big Lou shrugged. “Well, Prince Charlie didn’t get there,”
she said.
“If he had,” mused Matthew. “We’d have had more bishops.”
Big Lou looked thoughtful. “Robbie . . .” she began.
“I know,” said Matthew. “He’s got this thing about them, hasn’t he? He’s a Jacobite, I gather. I suppose that it’s a harmless enough bit of historical enthusiasm. Like those people who reenact battles. What do they call themselves? The Sealed Knot Society or something. You know, Lou, I was going for a walk in the hills above Dollar once and suddenly a whole horde of people came screaming down the slope. And suddenly I saw this chap in front of me dressed in sacking and wielding a claymore. And do you know who it was? It was an Edinburgh lawyer! Very strange. That’s how he spent his Sundays, apparently.”
67. We All Need to Believe in Something Big Lou stepped back from the counter and started to fiddle with her coffee machine. “Men need hobbies,” she began. “Women are usually far too busy with looking after the bairns and running We All Need to Believe in Something 225
the home and so on. Men have to find some outlet – now that they no longer need to hunt in packs.”
Matthew smiled. “So dressing up in sackcloth and pretending to be some ancient clan warrior is entirely healthy?”
“Well, it’s not unhealthy,” said Big Lou. “It’s odd, I suppose.
But it’s male play, isn’t it? There are all sorts of male play, Matthew.”
“Such as?”